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Moral Relativism

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Jack Cohen
Jack Cohen was born in London and has a PhD in Chemistry from Cambridge University. He moved to the US
… [More]and worked at the National Cancer Inst. and then Georgetown Medical School. In 1996, he Moved to Israel and became Chief Scientist of the Sheba Medical Center. He retired in 2001 and worked as a Visiting Professor at Hebrew University Medical School for 5 years. [Less]

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Navi Pillai, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, in an article (“Protecting Civilians,” J. Post, March 20) engages in moral relativism when she compares the sovereign democratic government of Israel to the terrorist Hamas government in Gaza and the illegal Fatah government in the PA (West Bank) . She compares their treatment of civilians and does not take account of the fact that, according to PA Pres Mahmud Abbas, the Hamas terrorists have illegally carried out a coup in Gaza during which they summarily executed hundreds of Fatah supporters, dropping them off buildings as well as torturing and shooting them. The PA itself is an illegal government, having cancelled elections which should have taken place in Jan 2009. This is moral relativism, in which she treats the terrorists equally with the democratic countries, and hopes noone will notice.

Of course, if she wants to keep her job, she has to ignore actual human rights and support the “rights of the Palestinians” irrespective of the reality of the situation and pretend that nothing is awry. For example, in her article she states “My visit brought me face to face with many large-scale human rights violations stemming from Israel’s occupation of Palestine.” Wait a minute, where is this “Palestine” that Israel is occupying. It may be that Israel is occupying parts of the West Bank, disputed territory at best, but as far as I know there is no entity and certainly no State called “Palestine.” Also, “At the conclusion of my visit I stressed that transferring civilians into occupied territory is plainly and unequivocally illegal.” But, what has this to do with human rights? It is not, in and of itself, a human rights issue, it is a political issue and in this she is taking the Palestinian side. As a UN Commissioner of Human Rights she should be neutral on this issue.

But, what can one expect when the UN Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva invited a representative of Hamas, Ismail al-Ashkar to speak. The irony is that his invitation was supported by Syria, whose President Bashar Assad is summarily murdering thousands of his own civilians. In the end, the outcry by the US, EU and other countries forced them to cancel his appearance.

But, at the same time the EU Foreign Policy Head Catherine Ashton showed her own moral relativism by comparing the deliberate terrorist murder of Jewish children in Toulouse to the deaths of children in a bus accident in Switzerland and the accidental deaths of children in Gaza resulting from Israeli responses to the barrage of 200 rockets that were rained down on Israel recently. However, UN representative Kuhlood Badawi of the Office of Humanitarian Affairs, deliberately faked the death of a child in Gaza by distributing a photo of a child killed in an accident in Qatar in 2006. With all this moral relativism and outright fraud how can one take anything that the UN or other representatives say seriously.

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